The dildo days of summer

(Let the title be a warning: not at all for kids or the sexually modest.)

The illustrations, beginning with an ad for a Channel 1 Releasing sale on pornstar dildos, are in an AZBlogX posting “The forest of dildos” (an apt description of #1 in that posting). The dildos in #1 are high-fidelity replicas of the cocks of particular pornstars, reproduced in loving detail (though the balls look pretty much generic to me, but then their function is mostly as a backstop), right down to realistic skin tones — a significant advance on earlier cock-shaped sex toys, which typically came only in two colors, pink and black, neither of them particularly lifelike. The guys in #1 are in fact so realistic they are probably not safe for WordPress (or Facebook or Google+).

#2 on AZBlogX has a set of fairly realistic traditional (anonymous) dildos in four skin tones, black and three food-oriented hues (coffee, caramel, vanilla).

#3 there has four “posable” dildos, highly stylized dicks, in extravagant colors — almost as far as you can get from (#1). (Not all the way, since the toys in #3 have stylized dickheads.)

[Vocabulary note: the compound dickhead ‘glans penis, glans’ (also: ‘a stupid, irritating, or ridiculous person, particularly a man’) counts as vulgar slang simply because its first element is dick ‘penis’. There is no stylistically neutral alternative: it’s either dickhead or the technical Latin glans (penis). The Latin plural of glans is glandes, but outside of medical contexts it’s hard to imagine anyone getting away with it. Treating glans as a fully assimilated English noun — it’s moving in that direction, but for me hasn’t gotten there yet — gives us the plural glanses, possible for me but more than a bit silly-sounding (I can’t help imagining a movie Parting Glanses), so I really prefer dickheads, crude though it is for many.]

General notes on dildos. A dildo is an object used for sexual stimulation by penetration (of vagina or anus), hence is unavoidably phallic in shape; but of course nothing requires that it simulate a penis in any detail, and some users prefer that it not — while others, in particular gay men, very much prefer that it do. These are men who want to venerate the penis as an object, and especially to revere the specific cocks of men they have seen in sex, in gay porn. From my AZBlogX posting “Beautiful penis” of 4/1/13:

Three ways to look at a penis:

As an aesthetic object (cf. beautiful hands or beautiful eyes). Context — the surrounding body, the way the body moves — affects judgments of beauty, as does the presentation: the way the body is posed and the art of the photographer. For me, the way the cock fits with the man’s body is very important here. Often cocks are presented as just jutting out or up, and out of proportion to the rest of the man’s body; I don’t find that beautiful. (Since these are aesthetic judgments, others might have different opinions. Notoriously, some gay men find uncut cocks ugly, and others find cut cocks ugly.)

Of course, there are many gay men who take the position that every dick is beautiful, each in its own way. Or, more succinctly: hey, dick is dick.

As an object of admiration or desire. You can admire a cock that you don’t find beautiful, or even don’t particularly desire — because of its size, or remarkable veining, or remarkable curvature, or whatever. As for desire, there are the “dick is dick” guys.

As a bodypart in sex acts. You might admire or desire a particular cock, but shy away from engaging it in your mouth or ass. Without practice, some big (especially fat) cocks are hard to take, especially if their bearers want you to deep-throat them; jacking them off is the natural solution, but many men don’t treat hand jobs as “real sex”.

Of course, though you might find a cock beautiful or desirable, but once you get it in you mouth or ass, its appearance becomes essentially irrelevant. Other properties — its size and curvature (in getting fucking) and also (in sucking) texture, taste, and smell become important.

Pornstar dildos allow men who are so inclined to worship cocks they have admired and desired on film or video, now at first hand, but without the possible physical awkwardnesses of engagement with the actual cock: to enjoy sex with a fabulous fantasy partner. Once the dildo is within your body, of course, its appearance is pretty much irrelevant to your satisfaction, but many men get a charge from engaging with the magic of the imagined partner.

Not all gay men. A substantial number don’t enjoy anal sex, and a substantial number of those who are enthusiastic about getting fucked nevertheless find pornstar dildos hard to handle, uncomfortable. Such a man might still want a pornstar dildo to display as an abstract object of admiration and, let’s face it, humor — in the self-mocking way I display gay dolls / action figures, with their ridiculously large genitals (cocks as thick as their forearms, hanging down almost to their knees).

Pornstar dildos on this blog and AZBlogX. Postings about dildos in general, as sex toys, are tracked in my “Language of sex” Page (here); rainbow dildos in my “Rainbow flag (other)” Page (here); and pornstar dildos specifically in a Page of their own.